Quoting apjung (Reply 7):Darn, I was remotely hoping that it would be AS announcing the first ever scheduled daily SEA nonstop.

Quoting dia77 (Reply 8):I was hoping for the same.... I fly SEA-MSY a few times each year and it's a pain

Quoting united319 (Reply 12):I was thinking the same thing. Kind of suprised they haven't done that yet. Seems like it would be a profitable market for them to serve.

...But apparently nobody bothered to look up the traffic figres in the market.
Here are the DOT's PDEW numbers for 2011 by quarter:
1Q - 109
2Q - 146
3Q - 128
4Q - 114
(These are the average daily O&D pax each way between SEA and MSY; the daily average for the year 2011 was 124.)

Despite some additional potential connecting pax over Seattle, I think it's pretty clear why AS is not in the market. At best, it would maybe support a single daily seasonal roundtrip and AS doesn't do seasonal longhaul mainline single-flight nonstops. But even the summer is questionable. I'm sure NOLA is on AS's "List" but I rather doubt it's real close to the top. There miust be lots of lower hanging fruit that AS would go after before this market. (For comparison, AS's most recently announced SEA nonstop route, PHL, had an average 2011 PDEW of 265.)

The numbers are there for MSY-SEA on AS. Assuming some stimulation (AS stimulated SEAAUS in 2009 by 20+%) and atleast 50% market share, plus connections at PDX (which is over 70 PDEW by itself and YYZ, ANC, BIL, etc etc) it could work quite well.

NK should do well at MSY... I think they'll add a number of cities in due time while NK takes about 7 new planes per year. NK could easily do MSY-CUN or SAP, SAL. MSY has a nice FIS that is hardly used.